SOURCE: Pease G. Y., Franklin. “Spanish and Andean Perceptions of the Other in the Conquest of the Andes.” In Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest, edited by William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease G. Y., pp. 15-39. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Pease argues that the manner in which Spaniards justified their sixteenth-century conquest of the Andes—by enforcing stereotypes that Incan rulers were illegitimate and treacherous, and that Andean people believed that Spaniards were gods—was a pattern of domination common to all Spanish conquests in the Americas.

Recent research has revealed the need to reexamine the way in which Spaniards and Andeans perceived each other. The Other thus takes on new importance and deserves greater examination. Scholars have noted that the attitude of the European in general was not open to perceiving and...